


The May-Born King

by Ankaret



Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-18
Updated: 2010-07-18
Packaged: 2017-10-10 15:50:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur has been driven into exile, but Mordred hasn't won.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The May-Born King

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zorrie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zorrie/gifts).



His hand closes over the stone curve of the balcony, as he looks out over Camelot. Lights shine in the windows. His eyes lose focus as he looks at the horizon, which makes the lights drift to and fro like lamps in ships at sea.

It wasn't meant to be this way, he thinks.

Behind him, he can hear the merriment of the court. _His_ court. Soon enough the bard will be reciting a tale of his conquests; he suspects it was written for his father, and it's lucky for the bard that _Mordred Pendragon_ falls on the ear with the same cadence as _Arthur Pendragon_ does, like the sound of one sword-cut followed by two more in swift succession.

Mordred's hand clenches on the stone, and a crust of lichen crumbles away under his hand. Many do not believe that Arthur _is_ his father, though they wouldn't dare say so to his face.

His looks are all his mother's. Dark-haired, grey-eyed, not tall. The proportions of his head and shoulders would have looked better on a man of his half-brother Gawain's strapping height. His features are handsome and regular, or so he has been told, and more in the Roman style than that of the Celts.

He knows himself to be Arthur's son, got on Arthur's sister. He was born on May Day, and put to sea to drown whilst still in his swaddling-clothes because of his father's superstitious fear of prophecy. Some say it was that sea-voyage that frightened him out of his growth. Mordred himself has nothing to say to that one way or the other. When he considers the matter at all, he thinks that incest is a good method for breeding traits into hunting dogs, and a poor way to make princes; and that drowning is a fool's way of getting rid of enemies. If one wants clean hands, for whatever reason – fear of the church, perhaps, or of the older powers that lurk in yew-groves and dark still water, or a promise made to a woman – then a hired executioner's axe is swifter and a pillow over the face more quiet. The stupidest path of all is to _attempt_ an enemy's death, and then half-heartedly return them to their families; and that, of course, was what his father did.

Mordred looks wearily out over the shining city, and reflects that that particular story is Arthur Pendragon in a nutshell; swayed by ranting druids and the taunts of his men and the wiles of women, unable to keep to one policy for two months together. His latest folly had been to race off to Rome to avenge an insult. As if an insult ever dragged a man away from the harvest and slew him, or left children without food in their bellies. It was a folly that gave Mordred the throne.

The broad wooden door opens behind him. Honey-gold candlelight light spills out from the musicians' gallery of the hall beyond. He can see the shadows dance on the gilded beams of the roof. A page bows to him. "My lord King..."

"What is it, Constantine?" Mordred asks. He is not accustomed to smiling; nevertheless, he is a man who children trust. He has never been sure why. If he were called upon to smother a child of his own blood for the sake of the kingdom – a child got on a Saxon sorceress or some other such political embarrassment, not a child marked out by some half-blind Druid's mumbling – he would do it with his own hands, and then eat a good dinner and sleep easily in his bed.

The boy's face kindles into a matching smile, which dwindles again like a candle at daybreak. "The Queen, Sire. You told me to tell you if she sent messages to Lancelot, or any of the others."

Mordred frowns. "Where's the messenger?"

"At the boat-dock, my lord King."

Mordred nods and claps the boy on the shoulder. His path to the boat-dock takes him around one wooden corner of the musician's gallery that circles the great hall, past laughter and the smell of roast goose and wine spilt on the rushes, and the sound of his men shouting his name. Then he passes through another door behind a heavy tapestry and down a narrow spiral staircase cut into the castle wall. His grey cloak bells out behind him as he descends the cold stairs. He thinks about Lancelot.

He doesn't hate the man. Mordred is not a man who is capable of hating what he doesn't understand, and he doesn't understand Lancelot in the slightest.

The Queen is a tiresome, complaining woman who insists on trying to meddle in politics when she has about as much political sense as a sheep. Mordred married her out of necessity, in order to placate her venerable but still powerful father and keep him from raiding over his northern border. He treats her with ironclad courtesy. He does not reproach her for being fifteen years older than him or for her barren womb. If she were not barren, she would most likely have filled the nurseries with Lancelot's square-jawed and empty-headed bastards by now, and that would be another problem for Mordred to solve.

He simply cannot imagine how Lancelot can prize the woman so highly that he is willing – _repeatedly_ – to put her whims above the loyalty he owes both to those above and those below him. It is a puzzle, one that Mordred tries to unlock yet again as his path takes him, with a sweep of his cloak, past the heat and bustle of the kitchens and down another wider flight of stairs.

He has come to no answer as he reaches the dock. The waterway is pillared, and lit by torches. They flare up red against the sooty walls. The water is oil-dark and fast-running, tugging at the moored boat.

Two of Mordred's men are holding the messenger by his arms. The messenger struggles. He spits at Mordred's feet. Mordred ignores it. His men are loyal and unlikely to be swayed by such displays, and no one ever died of being spat on. A sergeant hands him a scroll. He already knows what the contents will be, and that they will be pathetically misspelled.

He checks, all the same. They are.

"Queen Guinevere gave you these messages?" the King enquires politely.

The messenger turns his face away. He is young enough that the uncertain line of his blond beard is blotched by pimples. Mordred draws on one of the leather gloves at his belt, and backhands him across the face. Now there is a trickle of blood on the beard.

"You will continue to be the Queen's honest courier," Mordred says. He has never been one to gloat. He speaks the plain truth as he sees it, except to men for whom the truth will not do. "She will give you messages to be sent to Lancelot, or to my father, or Bors, or whoever she can prevail upon to take up her cause. You will bring them to such men as I appoint, and you will take the replies and return them to the Queen. And you will tell her nothing of this arrangement, for the sake of your safety."

He waits for the boy to gather up the courage to spit out something about not caring for his own safety, along, possibly, with a couple of teeth. Mordred cuts in smoothly just as he is about to speak.

"For your safety _and hers_."

"You wouldn't harm her!" the boy splutters.

"My father ordered Queen Guinevere burned at the stake for adultery," says Mordred pensively, looking at his own inconstant reflection in the rushing river. It flutters like a grey candle. "And he loved the woman, so I am given to understand. Think on that, and then on what _I_ might do."

The men drag the messenger away. To a scribe, Mordred supposes. He pays his servants well, listens to their complaints, and is not given to ungovernable rages; and in return, they serve him well, and only occasionally attempt to cheat him. The castle and the kingdom both run much more smoothly than in his father's time.

And yet all is not secure. Arthur will return; and whatever comes of that, whether it be son killing father or father killing son, it will make a wound in the land.

Mordred cares for the land, more than his father ever did. He does not believe in the Druids' nonsense about the mystic connection between king and harvest, regarding it all as so much claptrap and corn-dollies. For that matter, he does not believe in the bishops' stories of a man half virgin and half god, born in a desert land five hundred years ago, though he keeps prudently quiet about that, since excommunication would be an entirely avoidable nuisance. He does believe in the land. The land and its people. His land. His people.

He is King. But his wife conspires against him, and his father has been trying to deprive him of his inheritance since he slipped from his mother's womb on that cold May morning. He has the loyalty of the common folk, but not of all the nobles. When Arthur lands on some wind-raked beach in the south-east, many of those who are now drinking Mordred's health will kneel and kiss his father's hand.

It wasn't meant to be this way, Mordred thinks. But as for how it _was_ meant to be, that, he doesn't know.


End file.
